San Francisco BEAT: Talking with the Poets, edited by David Meltzer.
City Lights Books, 2001.
$19.95 — 425 pages.

“What the 50s were? It was politics and environment, and it was fights among ourselves and supporting each other. It was a struggle. It was exciting.”

- Michael McClure

“First thought, best thought,” perhaps the most repeated credo to have emerged from the Beat Movement in American literature, is most essentially put to the test in David Meltzer’s new book from City Lights, San Francisco BEAT: Talking with the Poets. Arriving in a conversational interview format, finally we have a major Beat publication with some teeth done by an insider rather than an outsider anthologist, a disgruntled wife, an illegitimate daughter, a jilted lover, a Naropa-ite, or an ambitious, fast-speaking woman with a feminist axe to grind. This welcome addition to the Beat canon is an intelligent and insightful look into the lives and thoughts of those who weren’t necessarily canonized by the media and therefore raised to the status of literary gods, as were the New York contingent (Burroughs, Corso, Ginsberg, Kerouac).

This, is the West Coast contingent, the movers and shakers of the San Francisco Renaissance, and a book written by someone (Meltzer) who was one of the inner circle. And this is how it should be — candid conversations conducted by a compadre and cohort over the span of some 30 years which facilitates the ease and depth of response that other so-called “classics” of Beat scholarship have failed to produce. In this sense, this book is the essential (San Francisco) Beat reader that others would lead you to believe sheds exclusive light on the collective soul of the Beat generation.

Talking with the Poets illuminates 13 of the Beat era’s most prolifically important (if not ignored and overlooked) poets as the thoughtful, interesting and intelligent — and often brilliant — people that they are/were- despite all the shadowy academic tales and media hype to the contrary. In many ways, with Meltzer’s patient style of interviewing and other deftly devised ways of bringing the best out of this select group (DiPrima, Everson, Ferlinghetti, Hirschman, Kyger, Lamantia, McClure, Meltzer, Micheline, Rexroth, Snyder, Welch and Whalen), this collection shines in ways that former books on the more famous New York contingent lacks.

As one of those rare artistic anomalies whose presence is pleasantly yet profoundly benign, David Meltzer’s tone and sense of style in San Francisco Beat puts one at ease from the get-go. True to his own keen poetic sense of paradox and wit, this book has got everything ... the gossip (Micheline bad-mouthing Ferlinghetti, Hirschman dissing Ginsberg, Lamantia’s aggressive indifference to the Language poets, Joanne Kyger’s kvetching about Spicer and Duncan); the subversive (Rexroth’s intelligent ranting against the church and state, Ferlinghetti’s anti-globalist economics and pro-anarchistic politics, Micheline’s obscure romanticism and his loving anger: “I live my poems. More than some of these intellectual bastards. They intellectualize their poems. I live it.”); the audacious (Lew Welch’s alcohol-driven transcendental sexuality: “I woke up after a wine drunk and saw this poem about ring of bone. And in the middle of [writing] it I got an erection and put my dick out the open window, and I came without even touching it;” Rexroth’s patriarchal preaching: “You can’t teach creativity. Scholars! Eliot! Shit!”; and DiPrima’s insightful confessions: “I sold 1,000 copies of my first book Floating Bear out of a stroller wheeling my daughter around New York. Two years later somebody came to me from one of the federal prisons and told me that 12 carbon copies of that first book had been typed in prison and passed around. Which to me was a bigger honor than any Pulitzer Prize.”); and the arcane (DiPrima again: “Duncan used to say all the time that when something is leaving the planet it enters the realm of the imagination. Real life, as we live it today, is fading, so there’s this terrific Beat fantasy, now.” Hirschman: “The spiritual dimension has to be informed by the material, and the material dimension has to be informed by spirituality, which is energy. And, of course, energy is matter. That’s the problem.” And Snyder “You can’t go to a monastery on line — it only exists in the real world.”).

But aside from the sensational, there are within the covers of this masterful collection of keen conversations insights into a concerned cadre of anarchists, socialists, metaphysicians, reformed Catholics and Zen Buddhists who have put their domestic lives on the line, making way for their stronger creative impulses and callings. From their commitments to this poet’s life have come a treasury of titles exemplified by such books listed in a brilliant bibliography as Rexroth’s The Alternative Society, Everson’s River Root, DiPrima’s Loba, Snyder’s Practice of the Wild, Micheline’s North of Manhattan, Hirschman’s Aur Sea, and Philip Lamantia’s Touch of the Marvelous, to name but a few. From these books and others cited in conversation, the reader is privy to not only insights into expanded consciousness, personal creativity and a more sensitive — if not spiritual — human community, but pearls of wisdom that often belie more mundane utterance.

° “It’s the news that stays news that counts.” — Gary Snyder

° “The songs of Shakespeare are permanently subversive.”  Kenneth Rexroth

° “The best talking we call poetry. If the poem is made right, it will sit well in any room.” — Lew Welch

° “A man has to make his defeats with women the building stones of his perfection.” — William Everson

° “Saying the unsayable — isn’t this what poets have always aspired to? Seemingly failing in the attempt but finally achieving a miracle of words.” — Philip Lamantia

° “For too many, poetry is not a matter of life or death. Why should it be? And why isn’t it?” — David Meltzer

° “Poetry comes from the most vulnerable, wounded sections of society and one’s own life. That’s where real poetry comes from. That’s where it’s always comes from. It doesn’t come from anything institutionalized. That’s not the real stuff.” — Jack Hirschman.

° “It’s the business of the future to be dangerous.”  Michael McClure

Along with these 50s generation “koans,” there is much talk of tradition in San Francisco BEAT, and in that conversation we find many common threads — things shared almost universally amongst our “lesser-known” 13: Blake, Buddhism, Rexroth, Ginsberg, Dogen, anarchism and Dylan Thomas. Most of these poets have been friends for 40 years, some longer. They are a testament not only to their abilities to survive, but as unique exemplars of their devotions, passions, intelligence and questing spirits.

If we are to believe Rexroth’s statement to Meltzer about the Beats being the last legitimate movement in American literature, then I propose that the conversations in this book are, collectively, a kind of canon. And at the very least, they represent a trend that will hopefully put an end to all the hype which has, up until now, served as the cornerstone for the Beat Movement’s gift to American literature, replacing it, bit by bit, brick by brick, with thoughtful conversation and work of poetic integrity worthy of respect. Here, in San Francisco BEAT, we have both the thoughtfulness and the integrity. We also have a sense of playfulness, as is evident in the last Zen-like lines of text finishing off a delightful exchange between Meltzer and Philip Whalen, which, coincidentally just might be good advice for us all:

DM: Does one have to be on one’s toes all the time?

PW: No, of course not. You just have to watch where your toes are.

(Thomas Crowe is a writer and editor who lives in Jackson County. Readers can contact him at newnativepress@hotmail.com)

 

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